Yesterday I googled what is holding me back and up came your site. A page with personal stories. After asking myself the question, "What is holding me back?," shortly thereafter I went to bed.

Here is an account of the dream I woke-up remembering. If you find it helpful you may publish it on your website. Maybe it could help someone else as their words helped me.

The Nightmare:
In this dream it is night. There are African American people, there is a bar. The bar is crowded. There is a pool table and I felt as if I had been raped there. I started asking questions of the people in the bar about the pool table, if anybody knew, if anybody saw. I was given some papers, cards maybe, and my name was signed on the card. It was writing I knew, writing I recognized. It was the way my mother writes my name in cursive. This bar was built on a grave. The room above it, maybe in it was also built on a grave. There were spirits. I went to sleep. There was a girl, an African American girl, young and very smart. I know this because she had a report card and I read it - she was a straight-A student. There was drunken women in the bar, also African American and well, I don't think she was only drunk, she was also on drugs. She had a little girl sharing a chair with her. The little girl was very skinny and smoking a cigarette. I remember thinking, why the hell does this kid have a cigarette in her mouth? I wanted to speak up, say something about it, and do something about it. But I did not. I knew it was not my place. I knew her place was lost.

Next thing I remember, I went to bed. I was sleeping and I was awakened by a spirit with two hands grabbing mine. They told me to come to the basement. I did not want to go to the basement. I was afraid of the basement. I wanted to call out to James who was sleeping next to me. I tried to call out, James, James. My voice escaped me. I could not scream. The hands kept grabbing my hands, pulling me up, telling me I had to go to the basement. I could not go, I was stricken with fear, such a real and deep fear. I did not want to go to the basement. I wrenched one of my hands from the hands of the male ghost. I grabbed a glass candle holder from the night stand and threw it to make a sound to wake James, to save me. I flung it to the floor, it did not break, it did not make a very loud noise, and the male spirit kept beckoning me to the basement.

I finally woke, stricken with fear and sadness. I remembered the spirit was a man and I felt as If I had seen the hands, remembered the hands, and my fear returned and brought with it the memory of a voice: "Let daddy touch you. Let the man touch you, spread your legs." My fear is that my father molested me but I have no memory of such a day. I remember the other men in my childhood who molested me; I remember the other men who made me feel raped even when I gave them my love freely.

I wonder if the hands were the hands of my father trying to take me to my fear, to resolve it, because earlier in the evening I asked myself to remember my shame and forgive myself. My shame originated with my molestation. The person who knew was my mother because she walked in on one of the many times before when my uncle Eric was molesting me. She did not discuss it with me on that day. Weeks, maybe months later, because I was doing poorly in school she sent me to a shrink. It did not help because I did not speak of that day again until I was grown-up. I was molested again in a basement some years later with my sister and my cousin Jane, Eric's daughter. Again my mother walked in after he had already molested my sister and my cousin, while he was molesting me by rubbing his penis between my legs. Again, mother did not speak of it until years later.

Since my childhood I have been seeking love and acceptance through sexual contact. I have even spent some months selling my body when more suitable work could not be found. I am trying to bury it, trying to get past it and I know I must deal with it. I believed I had but I know I have not. Please help me to learn what I need to go on. I am deeply saddened and highly disturbed today. I feel as if my guts are hanging out of my chest and I cannot breathe. I feel as raw as the day it happened, it may as well have happened last night.

OK - here we go. First of all, I have the feeling that your mother could not deal with the experience of seeing you abused or molested because in all likelihood, her brother molested her as a child as well. Sounds as if he is an extremely distorted person. Being around someone's energy like that growing up probably frightened her to death. Usually, when someone is abused as a child, because of their own trauma, they just can't deal with it, or they have developed the pattern or belief that that's just the way life is.... because they had no power to deal with it when it happened to them as a child, they don't think they have any power or ability to deal with it later, even when, as distorted and awful as it is, it's happening to their own child. They just instantly and automatically go right back into that powerless, overwhelmed, frightened and tormented child place, and believe that there's no possible way to change it or cope with it.

What happens when one is molested, especially as a child, is that a deep belief develops that one is no good, not worth loving, just something to be used, abused, and thrown away, as that is the energy that their attacker is putting out - it is also the energy that he lives in, hasn't healed, and then saturates the child with. The child thinks that if he or she HAD been worth loving, the person - usually someone they trust or love and "ought" to be able to love and trust - wouldn't have betrayed them. It's even more complicated and distorting when a parent sees the abuse and does nothing. Then the betrayal is magnified ten thousand fold, and the child is totally convinced at that point that they are worth nothing at all, not even worth being helped or saved by their own parent whose natural role in life is to love them and protect them. What happens then is all that is natural and good in life - such as the knowledge that one is safe and loved, that one can trust one's parents to protect one and keep one safe - that family members are also there to love and protect you - all of that gets twisted up and what ought to be the natural, harmonious working of life, of a sweet, loving, trusting child being kept safe and protected, becomes something very distorted. Children naturally think that it is THEIR fault if someone they love does something awful, because the child herself is so naturally caring and loving and just can't imagine that someone they love could be twisted. Therefore, they think it must be them, that they caused it by their own "badness". When that innocence of a naturally loving child is hurt and lost, it is a deep, deep wound. But, it CAN be healed. As you begin to truly understand what happened here, and as you learn to love and trust yourself again, you will be able to attract to yourself relationships and experiences that also come from this clearer, truer, NOT distorted place of Love.

So - because a pattern has been set for the child of seeing herself only as something someone uses and abuses for sexual purposes, the child continues to magnetize to herself more abuse and sexual exploitation - the pattern, in other words, becomes ingrained and the child continues to send out that wavelength into the Universe: "I'm here to be abused... I'm worth nothing... I'm only here to be a sexual object... etc." What also happens, unfortunately, is that the child equates relationship and love with sex and abuse, because a person who was supposed to "love them" treated them that way. It gets all tangled up in their mind. Love = sex and abuse. And, what we believe, we continue to create. It's very important that you untangle that equation. Love does NOT equal sex and abuse. That's just the pattern that got imprinted very early on - like a typo in a program you put into a computer. It needs to be deleted! Relating does NOT equal sex and abuse. It will be important for you to visualize and formulate for yourself, to gain a true understanding for yourself of what healthy love and relationship really looks and feels like. When you do your prayers offered here, make sure that you ask that the false programming you have about love be deleted, and a program and understanding of what Love really is be installed in its place.

The child also hides away this terrible shame and belief in himself/herself that he or she is worth nothing, that she must be bad. Therefore, she doesn't speak of it, as you didn't speak of it. Unfortunately, sometimes even when the child does speak of it, having the guts to be vulnerable and to try to get some truth and justice happening, the parents can't or won't believe it due to their own shame and abuse. They just can't face it or go there. It's too deeply buried, and to admit that they then allowed it to happen to their child is just too much to handle. So, then, once again, the child is faced with a world where truth doesn't matter, where no one believes him or her, where no one will help them cope or offer refuge, protection, or justice. So, they become even more jaded and angry and lose any kind of hope for themselves as well as any belief in any goodness or love or natural rightness in the world. So, the cycle continues... until they commit to their healing, as you have, and find a way out of it.

I don't know where or when in the vastness of all of our incarnations and lifetimes that such a distortion as child abuse got started... somewhere along the way, in certain families or gene pools, someone got bruised enough in some way... a distortion occurred in their make-up, some major trauma perhaps affected them and distorted their own natural and right development, and this was the result - unless it is transformed and dealt with however, the same distortion and trauma gets passed down through the generations.

One of the main ways out of this is that you must, no matter what others say, think, or believe:

SPEAK YOUR TRUTH - - not with rage or hatred or blame, but from a place of loving yourself enough to take care of yourself, to protect yourself, to set boundaries as to what you will or WILL NOT accept in your life, and to stand firm in your own truth.

KNOW that this DID happen to you and that it came from a distortion in someone's soul development. It did NOT happen to you because you are "bad". It came from some trauma somewhere along the way that changed the natural development of things - like a meteor bumping into another and getting deflected off course.

It is true that we do come into certain families, I believe, because we have the same belief systems or tendencies that they do. So, your soul may also have gone through a similar trauma at some point in your evolution and spiritual journey - in some incarnation - where you developed the belief that you weren't lovable or worth loving... if you, in other words, also had the tendency to be abused, due to this mistaken belief that you aren't worth loving - that abuse happens and is just a part of life - well, then you are caught in the cycle.

What is crucial to do is to change the belief system and to let go of, or disconnect from, the energies of it, completely. There are a couple of ways to do this:

1) Cut the cords to anyone and anything that has to do with this energy. To learn how to do this, read the article listed at the end of the home page on the Clearing the Way site about "Cutting the Cords that Bind You." I'd suggest that you continue to do the exercise offered in the article 3 times a day, for the next 3 years. Cutting the cords to this energy also must include the original trauma, wherever it occurred. Since you don't know when that was, you can do this by sitting in a meditative or prayer state, breathing deeply, calmly relaxed, and ask the assistance of the Universe, your guides and angelic workers, to do this for you, to heal and cleanse it away, to disconnect you from whatever the original trauma energy was that created the cycle. I'd do this with full heartedness, with your full intent that this happen, 2 times within a 2 month period. If you want to, light some white candles around you as part of this ceremony to symbolize purifying this energy.

2) Say the following prayer 2 times a day for the next 2 weeks: then trust that it's in the works and is cooking for you...

"Mother-Father-God and Holy Spirit: Assist me by directing all abuse and betrayal frequencies (and any and all inappropriate energies or beliefs that have consequently come from that) in my field to the God consciousness. Replace those energies with God's perfect Love energies. Thank you!"

3) Spend some time healing your first chakra, which is the place that holds the energy of tribe and family. Read about it first of all in Caroline Myss's book, if you can, 'Anatomy of the Spirit'. If money is an issue, just go to a good metaphysical bookstore and sit and read it there. Then, when you have an understanding of it, twice a day, sit in meditation and for perhaps 15 minutes, in a quiet space, with eyes closed, breathe slowly and deeply until you are very calm and relaxed. When you are relaxed, beginning at the base of your spine, at the tailbone, visualize a beautiful, glowing, fire engine red gently spinning wheel of light filling up that area. Tune into it, and that area of your body for a while, and see if you get a sense of how it feels. You then ask that this chakra be restored to 100% perfect health, form, and functioning - that whatever needs to be restored, be restored, and whatever needs to be corrected be corrected, and that whatever needs to be released, be released. Just sit there and continue to quietly focus on that area and allow a healing to take place.

It will also be important for you to do the same thing for the 3rd chakra, which is the core of our ego. It deals with our ability to honor ourselves and therefore to create honorable and healthy relationships with the outside world. With a healthy 3rd chakra, you are able to honor yourself and also others in the way that it is meant to be, with clarity, balance, truth, harmony, and compassion. Follow the same procedure, but you focus at the navel and imagine a beautiful golden yellow light there. When a child has experienced any form of abuse, there is a sense of being destroyed, and this needs to be healed and replaced with the sense of who you really are. Ask that that feeling and energy of being destroyed be fully released and replaced with the true knowledge of who you are. Allow that process to happen for you - just open to it. It will feel good and begin to heal you - to allow you to create the things that you truly want in life.

As you begin this deep healing journey that you are on - and many congratulations for embarking upon it with the level of commitment that you have to love and heal yourself - it will be important to begin to allow yourself to operate from the heart and not the angry beliefs you have carried for a long time - beliefs that life is something full of betrayal and that no one can be trusted. To experience trust, an open heart must come forth. The world gives back to us what we believe in - like a mirror. So, to have trusting relationships in your life, you must know and live in the energy of trust within yourself, for yourself - in regards to yourself. And, as you clear away the abuse frequencies in your field, it will be safer to do this. Again, speaking your truth will speed this along and develop a sense of inner power and strength for you - it will show you that you can trust and stand up for yourself - that you are NOT a victim - that you can do and create what is right for yourself.

To help open your heart... Place your hands over your heart and say 4 times out loud, twice a day: "My heart is enough". Feel how that really feels to know that it IS true - that your heart IS good enough and IS a most beautiful, and wonderful and loving thing. Just be with that for a few minutes, with eyes closed, taking it in.

To help you with your financial situation, to find a good job that matches your love and caring for yourself - when you sit in meditation - an important thing for you to do will be to open to and state the following request to the Universe:

"I am open to receiving guidance about my fears of earning money."

Focus on understanding and releasing any beliefs you have that you are "indebted" to another - old beliefs that have you think that you don't have the power you need on your own to take care of yourself in a way that feels good to you. As you clear up old issues of not having self esteem, or not valuing yourself... of coming from "victim" energy instead of "Creator" energy - knowing that you ARE the Creator - a spark of the Divine with all the power you need - ( once false beliefs are removed and gotten out of the way), this will also become easier.

Read also the article listed at the end of the home page about Calling Your Spirit Back, as there has been some significant amount of soul loss for you - and do the technique offered there. You need to have all of yourself back in order to heal. You can also say, before doing the technique:

"I am open to receiving guidance about how to call my spirit back from __( name the relationship or experience)"

Here is a link to a free 20-minute track from iAwake Technologies - a sample of the type of tools that will deepen your meditation immediately and help you quickly become a successful meditator. It's the opening track of iAwake's flagship product, the Profound Meditation Program, called the iAwake Experience...